Tells the stories behind thirteen of Britain’s most baffling murders, two from Scotland; the Madeleine Smith case of 1857, made into a Hollywood movie, Madeleine (1950) and featured in Edinburgh Wax Museum’s Chamber of horrors (1984), and the murder of Cecil Hambrough at Ardlemont, dramatized by BBC Scotland (1984).
One from Wales, the murder of Mabel Greenwood at Kidwelly.
Ten from around England, including Bradford’s child murder of John Gill in 1888, a crime possibly linked to either Jack the Ripper or the Thames Torso Murderer who plagued London between 1887-88; the Peasenhall murder of Rose Harsent in 1902; Emily Dimmock in 1907 which prompted Walter Sickert, believed by some to have been Jack the Ripper, to paint The Camden Town Murder and the very strange case of Evelyn Foster, The Burning Car Murder in 1931, which ought to have been solved but never was.
The book ending with two of the most perplexing murders of the 1950’s. The double murder of George and Lillian Peach in Northamptonshire and seventeen-year-old Ann Noblett from Wheathamstead, known as the Freezer Murder, in 1957.
Fitted in around these are an appalling child murder from the midlands; the unfathomable killing of Florence Nightingale Shore on a train to Hastings; the baffling shooting of Caroline Mary Luard near Sevenoaks, and the intriguing murder of Doctor Zemenides in London.
All are unsolved and will, in my opinion, forever remain so. Perhaps that is what makes them all so fascinating.